Roadside Bomb Kills 6 Afghans Working for Security Company

By REUTERS

Published: July 16, 2007

A roadside bomb killed six Afghans working for a Western security company in the east of the country on Sunday, the provincial governor said.

The six were traveling in a vehicle in Paktika Province, bordering Pakistan, when the bomb hit, Gov. Mohammad Akram Akhpalwak said.

Also on Sunday, President Hamid Karzai pardoned a 14-year-old would-be suicide bomber from Pakistan, caught last month while on a mission to blow up an Afghan provincial governor.

''Today we are facing a hard fact, that is a Muslim child was sent to madrasa to learn Islamic subjects, but the enemies of Afghanistan misled him toward suicide and prepared him to die and kill,'' Mr. Karzai told reporters at the presidential palace here, his arm on the boy's shoulder. A madrasa is a religious school.

The boy, Rafiqullah, and his father, Matiullah, a poor tradesman from South Waziristan in Pakistan, bowed their heads as Mr. Karzai spoke.

''His family thought their child was learning Islamic studies,'' Mr. Karzai said. ''The enemies of Islam wanted him to destroy his life and those of other Muslims. I pardon him and wish him a good life.''

Turning to the boy and smiling, Mr. Karzai said, ''You are now free and forgiven by the people of Afghanistan.''

Rafiqullah told The Associated Press over the weekend that while attending a madrasa in Pakistan, he and two other boys had been separated from the rest of the students, taught to drive a car and made to watch videos of suicide bombers carrying out attacks.

The boy said he had walked across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border into the province of Khost, where a man named Abdul Aziz gave him a vest full of explosives. Rafiqullah said that he told Mr. Aziz he was afraid of carrying out a suicide bombing, and that Mr. Aziz pointed a gun at him and threatened to kill him if he did not.

Taliban insurgents and their allies in Al Qaeda have unleashed a wave of suicide attacks and roadside bombs against Afghan, NATO and American-led forces in the last two years, seeking to show that the government and its Western allies are incapable of providing security. Most of the victims are Afghans.

About 6,000 people have been killed, around 1,500 of them civilians, in Afghanistan in the last 18 months as NATO and American-led troops battle with the resurgent Taliban movement. Officials in Kabul say many of the suicide bombers and Taliban fighters are recruited from impressionable youths in Pakistan's madrasas and sent across the border to kill.

Asked if he had a message for Pakistan, Mr. Karzai said: ''I have a message. It is a message of peace, forgiveness, a message pleading for better relationships, not cheating the children and encouraging them into terrorism and suicide.''